Description:
Sibelius's music notation and publishing software relieves headaches commonly associated with its genre--once a scoring decision has been made, getting it onto the virtual page is a matter of dexterity alone. We tested this workhorse on a networked Windows NT 4.0 machine with above-average muscle. Even though we were at times running four additional RAM-hungry applications, the tenth of a second refresh rate never even shuddered. We'd make a change, and the score would be dynamically re-rendered in nanoseconds. A Brahms piano Nocturne--Op. 118, No. 6, for those of you keeping score--was our proving ground. It was being made over into a tasty tapas-sized arrangement for chamber orchestra. After about an hour of reading the cheeky manual and head scratching, a feeling of euphoria began to encroach upon the usual swollen-throated despair that accompanies computer-based music notation. Our laziest prayers were answered. Can't remember the exact range of the bassoon? The note head turns red as a reminder. Don't feel like thinking in B-flat? The Transpose button lets you stay in the happy land of C right until it's time for one-click part extraction. Really, the only task that took some tongue-biting and eyebrow-knitting was an attempt at selecting a group of instrument staves for copying, rather than the usual single staff or entire grand staff. The handy Shift+Alt+key combination proved to do the trick, one of many such fruits of forethought from the designers at Sibelius. Additional qualities like ease of Web publishing and OCR (optical character recognition) sheet music scanning capabilities sweeten this product. Finally, the software's narrow waistband--a mere 10 MB for full install--leads us to believe that we're talking about a music notation and publishing powerhouse that will make its presence felt for years to come. --Dominic Johnson
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